


sparrow (hold your head high heavy heart)

by serenfire



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, Gen, Major Spoilers, So much angst, coda to catws
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-15
Updated: 2014-04-15
Packaged: 2018-01-19 11:54:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,913
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1468567
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/serenfire/pseuds/serenfire
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Winter Soldier heads to an abandoned safe house to wait out the aftermath, and finds it's already in use by one Jasper Sitwell.</p>
            </blockquote>





	sparrow (hold your head high heavy heart)

**Author's Note:**

> I don't seem to be able to write anything upbeat, do I? Enjoy (and by 'enjoy' I mean 'feel unreparable sadness for one Bucky Barnes that will never go away').
> 
> Major Spoilers for the movie.
> 
> @anyone I know irl: do not read thanks

Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies? Yet not one of them is forgotten by God. - Luke 12:6 

  


The Winter Soldier appears at the abandoned SHIELD safe house expecting it to be empty, damp and eyes glistening from museum relics. He is not Bucky; he is not. 

Sitwell greets him and keeps a gun trained on him until he allows himself to be cuffed to the radiator. It’s only to be expected—he did kill the SHIELD-turned-HYDRA-turned-SHIELD agent. 

“What are you doing here?” Sitwell growls. 

“Refuge,” the Soldier spits. Escape. 

Sitwell pulls up a chair two meters from the radiator, and the Soldier takes a look around the safe house. Four walls, a cot, a miniscule bathroom, a kitchenette, one window. 

Cosy. 

“So you’re alive,” the Soldier says, affronted. He reasonably suspected the agent to be in pieces on the side of the highway. Of course, he was alive, and he had fallen farther. 

“So are you,” Sitwell responds. “Bucky Barnes. All of SHIELD’s dirty secrets are out on the web, including yours. We all know who you are now.” 

It’s bitten sarcastically, an attack on him. 

He’s never been good with words. 

“I’m not Bucky Barnes,” he says. 

Sitwell hasn’t shot him yet, and cuffing means keeping. Was the agent not killing him because he was Bucky—because of the dead man’s body he inhabited? 

“So you’re an ex-Soviet assassin here for refuge; not because this is a SHIELD hideout and therefore as close as you can get to Captain America, as you remember you’re his old friend.” 

He is not Bucky Barnes. He doesn’t remember the Captain past when he first received his file, when he thought what a good cryogen Arctic ice makes. 

“I am the Red Room’s greatest accomplishment,” he inclines his head. “If you intend on keeping that handgun trained on me indefinitely, I don’t see how you’re going to get anything done.” 

* 

Sitwell’s purpose in this abandoned safe house is hacking into the CCTV to assess the extent of the inland damage manually. He sits on the cot, laptop cradled in his arms and the cord running between the Soldier’s cuffs to the wall socket. “So if you move, I know,” he had said. 

Sitwell had explained that JARVIS could monitor the civilians, but Fury—the only one aside from the Soldier to know he had survived—had put the ex-operative on this duty to allow Stark to perform rendezvouses more efficiently. 

JARVIS. The Soldier had read that in a file somewhere. 

Stark’s butler? 

AI. 

The ‘tech’ Sitwell spends his days using is what a target had tried to protect himself with when the Soldier had knifed him in ‘65. Ancient fossils. 

What a smart idea Fury had, keeping the officially deceased on probation but with a paycheck. 

After all, Sitwell wasn’t the first or the last to defect to SHIELD and become part of their system. 

* 

When the Soldier asks for water, Sitwell fills a bottle from the sink and pours it into his mouth. 

What the Soldier was really asking for was to be allowed to get out of his cuffs, if only for a moment. His circulation was faltering. 

Don’t break out of them, your superiors will be pissed— 

He’ll wipe you sooner than you can store away your mind— 

Sitwell isn’t your superior, he’s just an agent— 

You don’t have a commanding officer any more. 

* 

According to his source, the safe house was supposed to be empty. He’s supposed to have raided the food storage, slept for days, then left as quietly as he came. 

He doesn’t want that now; doesn’t want to leave a body and attract the attention of SHIELD it would bring. Not now that he doesn’t have a mission. 

“Does anyone else know I’m here?” he asks. 

Sitwell looks at him over the rim of his laptop. “Two people, including you, know I’m alive. I won’t contact anyone about you without due cause, do you understand?” 

He does. 

Don’t fuck up, and you’ll stay under the radar. 

* 

Metal peels away from dislocated fingers, and he’s dropping like a bullet, the first of many. 

The Captain hovers and falls, and the Soldier is diving off the falling ship after him because you haven’t told me why I’m Bucky. 

Ice envelops lungs and ears and consciousness. 

He breathes life into the body with barely any left to give. 

He scratches the glass steel of the cryochamber, don’t close your eyes they can’t stop your heart if you don’t let them don’t close your eyes, and falls, nerves fried, eyes open but lolling. 

He wakes, tearing his wrists at the cuffs, tears flinging away from his cheeks, cold steel of a handgun pressed against his neck and a hand on his collarbone. 

Sitwell is holding his shoulder and preparing to shoot him. 

He is also talking. 

“It’s okay—you’re not back there with them—he can’t get at you any more—it’s okay, you’re safe—no one can come after you.” 

The Soldier leans back against the radiator, cuffed hands hanging behind his back awkwardly. 

“No one knows I’m here?” he asks raggedly, because he might still be out there; after all Sitwell isn’t gone. 

“Just me,” Sitwell says. “If you’re nonviolent, it might stay that way.” 

Nonviolent. The Soldier grins—grimaces. He’s a weapon to be passed out to the richest bidder, and right now no one’s holding the trigger. He’s silent. He may as well be a free man. 

Sitwell backs off as the Soldier breathes deeply and closes his eyes, and his snores lull the agent to sleep. 

* 

“What do you remember?” Sitwell—call me Jasper, you’re going to stay—asks, 36 hours later. They had upgraded to not having weapons trained on him whenever he made a sound, which was more of an improvement than he had ever gotten with Pierce. 

The Soldier glared at the curious agent. He means from before. 

“I don’t,” he spits. All he remembers is a blend of missions, briefings, debriefings, and sedation, and not even clear enough to know if there are gaps of time. 

He remembers nothing that warranted a ‘before’. 

“Because Barton has been brainwashed, and if you want to talk about it, well, you wouldn’t be the first.” 

“He was brainwashed for days,” the Soldier grumbled. Not 70 years. 

He didn’t even know if he had anything in his mind to retrieve; if Bucky Barnes died when he fell. 

But he remembered falling, he remembered dangling and the taste of icy rain unable to keep up with his downward velocity. 

“I’m not Bucky Barnes,” he says. 

Jasper purses his lips but doesn’t respond. 

* 

The fifth day, Jasper gets a call. The Soldier strains to listen in. 

“Agent Romanov! Yes, I’m alive—I know this is Ward’s cell phone—I’m with SHIELD now—Fury knows I’m alive—holed up in the middle of nowhere, the goddamned desert.” 

Lies. They were on the outskirts of New Jersey. 

“I’m helping JARVIS, so that Stark can run recon. Fury’s orders—yes, this is an encrypted line; I’ve been telling you all this, haven’t I?” 

He stops talking, snapping his head up and glaring at the Soldier in such a way that his neck hairs prick up. 

“No,” Jasper says faintly. “Haven’t seen him since he killed me.” 

Romanov was talking about him. 

“Yes, I’ll contact you if he blows up something within sight of CCTV. But—” Jasper looks at the ground, “he’s in hiding, Nat. He won’t be found if he doesn’t want to be.” 

* 

Jasper paces the room, stubbing his toe on the cot. 

“What is it?” the Soldier growled. 

“Only three people know I’m alive. Two of them I trust with my secret and the third can’t have said anything. But the Falcon is hunting me.” 

“The flying man?” The Soldier is unimpressed with the Falcon. Tear his wings out of the sky, gun him down. He’s not made of metal like the Soldier; he’ll bleed like any normal man. 

“The veteran who’s friends with Captain America now,” Jasper explains, dropping onto the cot and pulling up CCTV feeds on his laptop. 

I know who he is. 

“They’re, well, I tapped into radio feeds near New York SHIELD meeting places. Fury didn’t send him. He’s coming of his own will.” 

“Then how does he know you’re alive? You haven’t gone anywhere near cameras.” 

Jasper doesn’t answer. 

The agent hadn’t even ventured outside. Cabin fever must be hitting him hard, stuck in 50 square feet within bomb-proof walls. 

The Soldier would be content to stay here for years. Sleeping without sedatives and comas; waking without prodding. Jasper kept an irregular sleeping schedule, and didn’t bother the man no more than a foot away from the radiator at all times. 

“I know,” Jasper sighs. “They’re still in New York, so we have at least an hour to abandon ship.” 

“‘We?’” The Winter Soldier raised his head to look at the agent. You’re taking me with you, what good will that do—oh. “Ransom?” 

Jasper winces. “Insurance. Wilson knows who you are to the Captain, so it might save both our lives.” 

The Soldier could see an alternate outcome in his mind if he stayed—being left to the radiator, dehydrating and wasting away. SHIELD agents shooting up the house before entering, to find Jasper Sitwell gone and the Winter Soldier himself choking to death on bullet hail. 

But he can break the handcuffs—I’m not ordered to stay trapped anymore by anyone who owns my freedom. 

He bends his metal arm around, wincing as the cuff bites into his raw, scabbing wrist. The cuff snaps, and his metal arm is free to tear the other one from the radiator. 

Jasper regards him emotionlessly. “Why didn’t you break out before?” he asks. 

The Soldier growls in response, standing up and taking a shaky step before falling again. No one owns me any more. I don’t have to stay. 

Jasper pulls a tight smile. “Then let’s go.” He pockets the handgun in the waistband of his trousers; and if that’s the only weapon they have against heaven and earth, they are fucked. 

* 

Their endgame is LA, and they’re going to hitchhike there. 

The Soldier snorts, bundled in gloves and too many layers for a summer day to conceal his metal sheen. Jasper said this is how one frees himself from the government. 

The Soldier doesn’t trust that the ex-operative knows anything about getting up and going—how to cause enough diversions in a ballroom to slip out the back door unnoticed; how to take and exchange hostages in return for freedom; how to lie motionless on a rooftop overnight just to shoot a figure in a window with just enough time left to slip into a cab. 

He knows he can just stand up and leave. He can meld into the Jersey underground as easily as passing through a door. 

But I’m not a weapon any more. 

Jasper has contacts who can help them, and he doesn’t call the Soldier ‘Bucky’. It’s a good match. 

After all, they’re both supposed to be dead. 

* 

They’re in a bus, going across an old country road. They take up the entire back row with their uncaring sprawls and spare layers bandaged over knife wounds that go deeper than previously thought. 

Jasper doesn’t have contacts any more. They also only have enough money to get to the border of Arizona and Cali, then they would walk the rest of the way. 

The Soldier eyes the agent, pressed against the opposite window. Jasper’s hair is growing in with derision, and his skin is pale from blood loss. 

He looks like the Death’s shadow. 

The Soldier could reach over and slip out the handgun from his waistband and exit at the next stop, all the while leaving Jasper to sleep. 

He would be a free man—or the closest he could manage, a gun for hire without a middleman. 

He leans over, and gauges Jasper’s breathing to determine if he is still asleep. He eases the handgun out of Jasper’s trousers, and holds it in his hands. 

It’s the first time he’s held a gun since facing the Captain. 

Since Bucky. 

He’s repulsed. He put his weapons down to give the Captain a chance, to allow Bucky to be talked into form, and now he was obliterating all memory of the man. 

Opposites attract, after all. 

But he would never take a memory away from someone, so he can’t run away. 

The Winter Soldier had been to the museum; had seen into the window of the past, with the man who shared his face and accent. What was the use of running away from the Captain’s right-hand man now? 

Not running, just following one who is running. 

That would mean he’s still only a weapon; still only an outstretched limb of a fugitive, as flexible as dynamite and twice as shiny. 

He’s falling. Metal splinters in his ears and the gun in front of his eyes turns to a glass shield. He reaches for it and it’s gone, shattered into river water and he’s going under once, twice, fleeting life and fleeing death— 

Jasper puts a hand on his shoulder and he cocks the handgun, shoving it against the agent’s neck. 

“I will kill you,” he breathes. Hell, the bumpy country road underneath them might do it for him. 

Jasper doesn’t show emotion. The Soldier has already killed him once. 

“You weren’t able to finish the job before,” he says. “You were too intent on getting to your target; your mission. I’m not your mission now.” 

“I don’t have a mission now,” the Soldier breathes. 

“Does that make you feel purposeless?” Jasper asks. 

The Soldier jams the gun further under his chin. You’re not a shrink and you’re not my superior I killed you— 

The gun melts along with his rage, and he drops it. 

I am better than chasing a mission; I have to be to survive without one. 

“I didn’t go to the Captain because he was my mission,” the Soldier confesses. He didn’t rescue the Captain because of the same reason. “I needed to know about Bucky.” 

No one had ever bothered to give the Soldier a name before. ‘Winter Soldier’ was brought about by Cold War gossip. He was the outstretched limb of the Soviet Union. He didn’t need a name. 

But ‘Bucky’ was someone else’s name; he could see it in the Captain’s face when he spoke it. Pain. Loss. Deeper, unshed tears of blood and fire. 

He couldn’t take it; he wouldn’t accept it. It wasn’t him; he wasn’t the American soldier in the pictures and the videos, no matter who he looked like. 

He had scraped fingernails on the blood and glass coffin of cryosleep too many times to be that man. 

So the Soldier disentangles himself from the agent, and hands him back his gun. 

“I don’t have a mission,” he says as Jasper pockets it. “I will never have a mission again.” 

He swears it. 

* 

The Captain catches them before their wounds heal, as they’re leaning on each other to reach the safe house. 

The Soldier freezes. What about the Falcon? 

Jasper Sitwell smiles wearily at the Star-Spangled Man. “Here we are,” he gestures to the two of them. “It took a bit longer than expected.” 

The Soldier looks between him and the Captain. The Captain has the sniper trained on him, not Jasper. “You are working together,” he mutters as it makes sense. He doesn’t have it in him to feel betrayed. He’s done it more than enough times. 

Jasper steps out of range of his metal arm, and the Soldier isn’t wearing any bulletproof material to feel anything but suicide when he tackles him. 

Arms grab at him, securing and surrounding him, and his strength and metal can’t prevent him being pushed into the dirt, wounds reopening and stomach growing warm with blood. 

He doesn’t struggle. The Captain won’t kill him; he didn’t kill him last time. 

The Captain walks up to where his head is planted in the soil and says, “Bucky.” With fondness, and—and finality. 

He hates it. He doesn’t look up when he spits, “That’s not my name.” 

“Why not?” the Captain asks as the agents manhandle the Soldier to his feet. 

“It’s the name of the dead man whose eyes I use.” Not much else is left of his body. He doesn’t know if he recognizes the Captain’s face from before he read his file; he can’t remember. 

The Captain taps his flesh and blood arm. “You’re not dead yet,” he says. “But anyone who dreamed of controlling you is.” 

It should be a better prospect. No more missions, no more superiors. 

Just a blank wall for his memory, and an assassin’s reflexes for his mind. 

And it’s slipping. 

* 

A recording device is placed in front of him, and the Captain motions for him to speak. 

He closes his eyes. 

“There was—I remember,” blue fire, scorching bullets whipping against the wind, inhaling coal and riding a zipline— “ice. It was snowing. I could taste the flakes on my tongue. I smiled before sailing onto the train.” 

He opens his eyes to see the Captain’s eager face. “It was winter.” 

Bucky Barnes died that day, miles underneath the fractured water, with Steve’s name engraved on his lips. From his waterlogged corpse, the man here today was born. 

He was born in winter. 

-fin- 


End file.
